So in the process of figuring out music to play when doing my nightly number crunching, I found this Pakistani singer, Rafaqat Ali Khan via his album Nishaan. And the man, in keeping with his "Ali Khan" name, has a delish voice. Go listen to "Maawan" ("Mother" in Punjabi) to see what I mean.

The song below, "Maula Maula", which he sang for a Bollywood movie isn't bad either:

This sparse song, titled "To Build A Home" was the penultimate piece performed by Cinematic Orchestra, a mind-bending band from the UK that I go to see perform live in Central Park yesterday. These folks came reccomended to me by a recently made friend, and I had to go after reading their self-description: "make music for movies which may or may not exsist". Take a look at this video titled "The Man With The Movie Camera" to see and hear what I mean.

Gotta love New York in summer - one can, in theory, go to multiple world-class concerts in the same day, all for free!

Since I am in a temporary hiatus at work (in the professional parlance: on the beach), last evening I skipped and hopped over to the isle of Brooklyn to meet up with old friends, and then hit Prospect Park for a Celebrate Brooklyn concert. I had to go for the concert was billed thusly:

"Cape Town composer Philip Miller's extraordinary international collaboration is based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that led South Africa from apartheid to democracy. Opera superstar Sibongile Khumalo joins other South African soloists, a string octet, and a 100-voice chorus composed of Brooklyn's Total Praise Choir of Emanuel Baptist Church, the Williams College Choir, and a South African ex-patriot choir led by Lion King choirmaster Ron Kunene. The music blends seamlessly with samples of recorded TRC testimony and stunning projected images."

Given that South Africa has flickered on the horizon of my imagination¹ for a long time, via bookish engagement with this diamond-glittering lode of pain, through the work of Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and the powerful trilogy of memoirs by Breyten Breytenbach (everyone should atleast read the middle book of this trilogy "The True Confessions of An Albino Terrorist"), this cantata of word, image and sound built on the armature of TRC testimonials by mothers who buried their sons, preists who were mutilated by letter bombs, interrogators clinically describing the tools of their well honed torture trade², and finally P.W. Botha's Kafkaesque assertion that Apartheid, that lovely Afrikaans word, in plain English simply means "good neighborliness", was a really moving experience.

Finally, here are two short NPR clips from the cantata for you to listen.

[1] Also what is recent Indian political history but a explosion of a concept - satyagraha - fashioned in the South African townships?